Coming Soon: The LinkedIn Teammates Feature

“Should I Connect With My Work Colleagues?”

It’s a question I get a lot. People often worry if Connecting with their colleagues is pointless or not the usual social etiquette.

“I see them every day, why would I want to connect with them?”

“Does it look a bit ‘funny’ if I connect?”

I see their point, but my answer is yes! You are all ambassadors of the brand you work for. The opportunity to Comment on, Like or Share something a colleague has shared helps add weight to the value of the post. It allows a conversation to begin. It stimulates others to join in too. To see your colleagues’ posts in your feed — posts about work they have done for your company — you need to Connect with them or, at the very least, Follow them.

As social media expert Rachel Hatfield MSc recently told me on LinkedIn, she’s always Connected with her colleagues and university friends since she first began using LinkedIn way back in 2003. They don’t always remain in the same job, but they can become great contacts for you in the future, which her former colleagues and university friends have all become now that their careers have progressed.

What Is LinkedIn Teammates?

Well, LinkedIn is making this option of collaborating and Connecting with colleagues, and engaging with their content, a whole lot easier — welcome ‘Teammates’, a new feature that helps you quickly add your current teammates on LinkedIn [see picture on the right].

Rolling out soon worldwide, simply visit ‘My Network’, and look to the left panel. When this feature is enabled for you, you should see the text “Add Teammates”. Here, you can specify your manager, peers and/or direct reports.

You might then find more updates in your feed about your team’s activity on LinkedIn, such as posts, Comments, Likes, Shares, and work anniversaries. If your colleagues add you as a teammate they will then, in turn, get notifications about your LinkedIn activity. (This excludes your private actions on LinkedIn. For example, when you send private messages, conduct discreet searches, or view job postings.) This should make supporting each other on LinkedIn a more seamless experience.

What About Getting Notified When My Company’s Page Publishes a Post?

While the new Teammates feature will make it easier to get notified when your colleagues post and share things on LinkedIn, Speechwriter Rune Kier Nielsen recently asked me over on LinkedIn if it was possible to make sure his colleagues got to see or were at least notified when their Company Page shared a post.

I explained that who sees what on LinkedIn is driven by LinkedIn’s algorithms. There’s no guarantee that you’ll see content from your Connections. In my experience, it is even less likely that you’ll get to see news from Company Pages. However, if you regularly engage with a person’s content, there is a greater chance that you WILL get to see it in your feed. So, logic dictates that, if your colleagues regularly interact with content published by the Company’s LinkedIn page, content from that source is more likely to appear in their LinkedIn newsfeeds.

Rune highlighted how there is an option on Facebook to click on a profile and instantly move posts published by that profile to the top of your newsfeed. As LinkedIn Company Page Admins, he and his colleagues get a notification when the Company Page posts something. But he believes his colleagues who aren’t Admins of the Company Page should also get the option to ‘favourite’ content from the Company Page to increase interaction and the reach of posts. I agree with Rune, but unfortunately, LinkedIn is always behind the curve on the best under interfaces.

Returning to the ability to see colleagues’ posts (rather than a Company Page’s posts), increasing activity amongst a group of colleagues will also increase the chance of more people seeing and sharing the content. Think content amplification. The new Teammates feature will definitely increase the amount of content you see from your colleagues!

In the spirit of collaboration and team building, I’m all for the new Teammates feature. I believe it will be a valuable asset to any LinkedIn strategy.

What do you think?

Will you be adding your workmates?